Diverse Solutions Mobile Script

I know a lot of RE bloggers are using Diverse Solutions for their IDX provider. We use DS on our Tucson site and love it. Our biggest problem is keeping the number of registrations under 1000. As an aside I wish DS would provide a better registered user management interface. Now let’s look at the DS Mobile Script Option

DS Mobile Script

Diverse Solutions has been rolling out a mobile script that you can install on your site to take your visitors to your search page directly to your DS mobile search page that you can configure from the DS Control panel. I love it. Gives you total control over the mobile visitor and you can setup custom pages for them to see and a custom search for them to view etc.

Be careful how you install it. The instructions on the control panel say to paste the code in the header of your site before the </head> tag.

What they don’t tell you is if you do that for the main site header.php it will take every visitor to your site no matter what page they are trying to access from their mobile device to your DS Mobile page. EVERY SINGLE MOBILE VISITOR TO THE DS MOBILE PAGE.

Why? because you put the script in your header.php file which is the beginning of ALL your pages not just your search page.

The Solution to installing DS Mobile on a WordPress Blog

The solution isn’t very hard if you know a little code and have FTP access to your site.

You have to create a custom page and header template for your DS Search page.

Here is a quick way to do that (I’m using the TwentyTen theme in this example).

Copy the header.php and page.php file from your theme directory to your computer.

rename the header file to be header-search.php

copy the DS Mobile script into that header-search.php

rename the page.php to search-page.php

Add the page template tag to the top of the search-page.php file

Change the call to the header to be the header search.php

Upload them to your theme folder

Open your Search page in the editor and use the new search page template

This is the one from the TwentyTen one column template change the template name to Search Page

Change the header file call in the Search Page template

Close to the top of the page you will see:

get_header(); ?>

Change this to

get_header(search); ?>

Once these steps are done your visitors will only go to the DS mobile page for the search page and not every page or post on your site.

As with all site modifications, once you have completed these steps, test it by using your mobile device to access your site.

Don’t forget to configure the mobile page on your DS control panel, don’t just copy the script to your site. Scroll down on that page and fill in the information you want to convey to your mobile search visitors.

Comments

As you mentioned, our mapping IDX product now includes script you can use to automatically direct users on a mobile device over to the mobile IDX search. This mobile redirect script can be used inside the tag of a single page on your site – or inside the tag of every page… and sometimes it’s tricky in WordPress to tell whether you’re editing the header for just a single page or the header for your entire theme, so your post is much appreciated! We’ll see if we can make it easier for WordPress users to implement the mobile redirect code to avoid confusion.

As an added note, the 1,000 registrations limit ONLY limits the number of contacts you can add through our admin area. In other words, here’s how new contacts appear in your account: you manually creating new contacts in your admin area, you import a CSV in your admin area, a visitor fills out a contact form or chat box on your IDX or site, or a visitor registers. Once you hit your limit (in your case: 1,000 contacts), the system will simply prevent you from adding contacts manually in your admin area – – but you could easily go over the limit and end up with 5k or 10k contacts in your account simply from contact forms and new registrations, as we never limit those. Make sense? The limit is really just to prevent people from importing (or otherwise adding) 1,000’s of random contacts for spamming purposes… it’s not designed to limit your registrations or lead capture capacity at all 🙂

That’s good to know about the 1000 limit. I’ll stop trying to keep us under that. We never import. Since we have no reason to import people into the system. Our approach is “Leave them alone” so no drip campaigns, no emails to contact beyond one on one when they email us. Cleaning that list below 1000 has been a pain. Now I’ll just let it grow.

Thanks,

Dave

(PS found your comment in the spam filter, you might want to check with Aksimet)

I was going to reply with the same info about the 1,000 limit Robert. I looked into this IDX before I went with REW. That would be a pain if they did limit you to 1,000 registered contacts! No worries though… You can keep building. I think a drip campaign can be useful on some leads though. I don’t use it on all my leads, but have a few Login Info, and Just Checking In drip e-mails for leads that don’t respond and don’t come back. It gets them coming back to the search.

Dave, we use DiversSolutions IDX on our website in Indianapolis, IN and placed the script on our home page. If a mobile user lands on that page, they can decide if they want to go to the mobile application or stay on the site as is. Anyway, you have me thinking about how that is supposed to work. I’d better check. Thanks for the post.

Great article. I’ve had great luck with Diverse out of the gates, but can’t say that the 1,000 hurdle is an issue. 😉 Thanks for the write-up. Just like Mike Woods above, you pointed out a concern I hadn’t had.